Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

George Hutchinson

Committee Members

Mary Papke, Charles Maland, John Hodges

Abstract

To live in the United States today is to live in a multicultural universe, one in which individual worlds continuously collide, intersect, or exist side by side and in which boundaries, both geographical and sociocultural, are violated daily. This dissertation examines five novels and one autobiography by contemporary ethnic women writers to determine the influence of belief in supernatural forces on bicultural individuals as they mature and define themselves in such a world. How is the process of self-definition affected by one's personal beliefs, by the community's beliefs, and by the outside world's beliefs? When are such beliefs — or conflicts between beliefs — constructive, and when are they destructive, and when is a partial or total reconstruction of such beliefs called for? Ultimately, all six works demonstrate that personal power is acquired through self-definition, that is, through the construction of one's own mythology — or reality — and through the location and claiming of one's own center. Lee Smith's Oral History, for example, tells the story of Red Emmy, whose failure to break out of her externally imposed identity as witch symbolizes the inability of many Appalachian women to escape both the geographical and sociocultural boundaries of Appalachia. Louise Erdrich, in Tracks, tells the story of a Chippewa witch, Fleur Pillager, who although defined from both within and without discovers the limitations of her powers as the whites increasingly invade and destroy the Chippewa world. In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, the half-white, half-Pueblo Tayo, who left the reservation to fight in World War II, finds his way home both physically and spiritually through a revitalization of his belief in the Laguna Pueblo spirit people. In Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, Cocoa constructs for herself a new world that combines belief in the powers of the self, drawn from the world of New York, with belief in supernatural powers, drawn from the world of Willow Springs. Toni Morrison's Beloved focuses on the power of Beloved, an incarnate ghost, to force Sethe, Denver, Paul D, and the community to redefine themselves and their relations to each other through a confrontation with their individual and collective African American past. Similarly, Maxine Hong Kingston, in her autobiography The Woman Warrior, describes her efforts to define herself in relation to her Chinese heritage and her life among non-Chinese Americans by confronting and giving life to the ghosts of her girlhood. Thus, self-definition by the ethnic individuals described in these six works demands that they examine their beliefs in the supernatural, rejecting, renewing, or modifying those beliefs held by family, community, and the dominant culture. An introductory chapter briefly discusses ethnicity, ethnicization, and the ethnic writer; the realist and postmodernist tendencies of ethnic literature; the value of group and individual self-definition; the role of belief in individuation; and the sociopolitical function of ethnic literature.

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